Doris Duke's Shangri La: Center for Islamic Arts and Cultures

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
By Matthew Gurewitsch

Meeting of Shah 'Abbas and Vali Muhammad Khan in 1611

NEW YORK ---Born in 1912, [Doris] Duke died just shy of her 81st birthday in 1993. Obituaries ticked off the death of her self-made father when she was 12. Duke was a woman of many talents. She spoke fluent French, played the piano, baked fine whole-wheat bread, filed wire dispatches from postwar Rome, and surfed at the championship level. Yet her greatest talent may have lain in the art of cultivating personal oases. But the most remarkable of them all was the Xanadu that Duke built from the ground up at Kupikipikio, a remote spit of land on Maunalua Bay by the foot of the extinct volcano Diamond Head. Duke called it Shangri La. Its doors have been open to the public since 2002. [link]